As Game of Thrones (GoT) has become infamous for continuously broadcasting horrific gender relations, sexualized violence, rape, incest, and child abuse (Carroll 2018), its defensive legitimacy builds precisely on the alleged historicity of a patriarchal Middle Ages. Martin’s epic fantasy story, A Song of Ice and Fire, portrays a societal order that seeks to mimic a popular understanding of the feudalism of medieval Europe (Larrington 2017). This immensely successful screen adaptation of R. In this article, we put anarchy and neo-medievalism in dialogue with a popular depiction of the medieval imagery: the TV-series Game of Thrones. 56) puts it: “The medieval era is the dumping ground of the contemporary imagination.”
Whereas the medieval analogy in Bull’s understanding has a normative connotation, as a catalyst for functional differentiation, cooperation, and diplomacy in the international system, critical scholars have warned that this idealized understanding of the medieval order is inadequate for describing the reality of contemporary world politics (Cerny and Prichard 2017), and that it has come to enforce, as Holsinger ( 2007) has it, “a paradigm of neoconservative intellectual renewal.” Previous research has also shown how the imagery of the Middle Ages is frequently reproduced in popular culture (De Groot 2009), and how medieval tropes are employed to animate contemporary political issues (Eco 1986 Elliott 2017 Robinson 2012). The concept of neo-medievalism has frequently been recharged to analyze, for instance, digital communication (Kobrin 1998), international law (Arend 1999), the EU-project (Brommesson 2008), civil war (Winn 2004), and global warfare (Ligouri Bunker 2016).
246) suggested a move toward what he called a neo- medieval order that relocates nation-state power to “a structure of overlapping structures and cross-cutting loyalties that hold all peoples together in a universal society while at the same time avoiding the concentration inherent in a world government.” The contemporary world order is in this sense understood to reassemble that of the medieval European world, a fragmented anarchical society of overlapping and incomplete sovereignties (Holsinger 2016). In this sense anarchy is understood as “pathological but productive” (Havercroft and Prichard 2017) in a global anarchical society it produces what neorealist Waltz ( 1979) once called “order without an orderer.” In the seminal piece The anarchical society, Bull ( 2012, p. The notion of anarchy exposes how political and economic international relations-in the absence of a global government-can be comprehended as a perpetual conflict to appropriate such a power vacuum. Anarchy has since long served to conceptualize the prerequisites of the modern world system.
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